I am sometimes asked: Are we standing at the end of
the Christian era? Where can we go from here? It is difficult to know
how to respond to such questions. I am not a prophet, only a historian.
Therefore, my most honest answer is "I do not know." Such an
answer satisfies few people. They rightly assume that if one has spent
one's life studying history, one must have formed at least some suspicions
about the future. And that I have.

My best guess is that the future will be like the past. Deep trends of
the past will continue into the future. This said, it is central that
we not be confused about the deep trends of the recent past and of our
own day. It is often said that we live in a time of secularization.

One of the things that I argue in the later chapters of my book, Beginning
at Jerusalem, is that this is only half the truth. Rather, in
all periods there are two tendencies, one towards secularization and one
towards sacralization. These typically occur at the same time, so, so
far as secularization is concerned, the times are always mixed.

Secularization can be defined and understood many ways, but if we take
it to mean a tendency to consider the world apart from God, we can see
that neither secularization nor sacralization is intrinsically good. Although
medicine should not consider health without considering God, there is
a sense in which medical advances are made by bracketing God, by at some
given moment considering some specific problem, tuberculosis say, in its
own right.

As long as we do not forget at the end of the day
to bring back what we have learned from such specific study into relation
with God, we have here "good secularization," a discovery of
how our world works which would not have been possible if we had only
looked at God. Similarly, we can not praise every sacralization or centering
of the world on God, a witness to which is Islamic fundamentalism.

The point is that desireable and undesireable secularizations and sacralizations
occur in tandem throughout history. We should expect that this will continue
in the twenty-first century. Those who think that religion is dead, that
we are living on a one-way street leading to the elimination of God from
life, almost certainly are wrong.

What we should expect, rather, is the same kind of struggle between the
cultures of life and of death that have especially characterized the last
few centuries. Pope John Paul II has eloquently characterized the nature
of these cultures, and his writings will remain central to understanding
the times that are upon us. Many will continue vigorously to free themselves
from God, and many will struggle in a counter-cultural way to live a life
pleasing to God.

To do the latter, certain resources will be necessary, and this is why
I wrote my book. It is one thing to lament the times, another thing intelligently
to work to change them or be effective within them. Good change rests
on correctly understanding what has happened in the past, and why. It
is one thing to berate what we dislike in the world around us, another
to understand how these things formed. We sometimes feel something is
absent from our lives, without exactly being able to put our finger on
this.

My argument is that some of the things we lack were possessed in one form
or another by other ages. If we want them in our lives now, we have to
understand why they took some earlier form, why they were lost, and what
they would look like if present in our own day.

I presume that one can never go home in the strict sense of recovering
some earlier condition. What my book is in considerable measure about
is what things earlier existing and now largely lost would look like if
recovered today or tomorrow. This is why I pay such attention to the liturgy,
and to the effects of living in an individualistic society on how we think
about and experience religion.

I have no delusion that I or anyone else can sit down and in some comprehensive
way plan the future. We can know what sides to take in the great struggle
of our days, but it can not be stressed too much that God is the author
of history, and all history lies in his hands. What is asked of us is
fidelity. We should expect neither to succeed nor to fail: this is in
God's hand. Likely, our lives and the age that is upon us will be mixed,
with both triumphs and losses. In any case nothing in history lasts, and
we would be advised to think more in categories of "temporary"
or "mixed" successes and "temporary" or "mixed"
reverses.

Central is the theological virtue of hope. This is not the same as the
cheery but superficial virtue of optimism. Hope means that we place our
lives in God's hands, trust him, and by our best lights work for a world
which properly acknowledges him. We might speak of living in our times
as St. Ignatius Loyola lived in his; of trying to imagine how Ignatius
would live if alive today.

Glenn
W. Olsen is a Professor of History at the University of Utah, with
a Ph.D. in the history of the Middle Ages. He has contributed numerous articles
to many historical journals, including Communio and Logos,
and is also the author of the book Christian Marriage: A Historical Study
(2001).

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